8: On accelerationism "takedowns"

neural shroud

Occasionally there pops up an article about how accelerationism is all "wrong" or "failing". Let's first examine some quick probably-truths here:

Humanity has fucked up severely, in the sense of keeping Earth a good place to live in the future.

Capitalism doesn't really "work" as intended, profit isn't being produced out of nothing, almost no industry is profitable if you stop discounting externalities (environmental costs, long-term health, mental health, etc). "Externalities" is really just a fancy term of closing your eyes and ears and hoping that someone will come in and fix it all. Even though we're in a self-contained aquarium and magic isn't real.

It's too late to prevent a collapse on at least some level. Most likely it won't leave us with a Mad Max-esque world, but the effects will be significant. Massive climate change and a spectacular financial crisis are things that will happen very soon and denying it is kind of silly.

No, all humans won't die. The species will live on, of course. We are stubborn little fuckers. But modern society as a system will most likely collapse and will have to rebuild.

Capitalism is at its core a very simple optimization mechanism. One that arises organically. It is a mechanism that works perfectly in a theoretical vacuum, but turns into a cancer when subjected to the imperfections of the real world. It emerged and it will always emerge again.

That leaves us here now, pre-collapse. With a bunch of data in our hands. Post-modern and post-nihilistic. We have three ways to go:

Ignore everything and keep on trudging/fucking around

Try to prevent the collapse

Try to figure out what happened/what might happen

Knowing all the above-mentioned facts it's very hard for me to accept any of the first two options.

The third one though seems like a good deal. We're beyond the finish line. A temporary one, but either way a finish line of sorts. We're just kind of walking about, catching our breath, waiting for all the other runners to catch up.

What we have is dead time, a Rube Goldberg machine that we just need to watch do its thing. Once all the balls have rolled down their slopes and all the yarn has been cut by automated scissors we can finally move on. So we shuffle in place. Not really impatiently, but not fully content either.

This is a good time to reflect on the race, the journey to right here and now. Untangle all the complexities that arose on the way, get some insight for the future races.

But we also have mostly no idea about racing and how it works. How can we judge a fellow racer who decided to go and measure air density on the track? Maybe it's the key. Maybe it's the contraction rates of our muscles, or it may a complicated nightmarish equation that takes it all into account.

Either way, no obviously stupid theory here can be discounted. Our legs are tired, our lungs full of microplastics and vape residue. Best we can do is put our theories together in a nice little binder and move on to the next race, probably passing our binder on to new racers. Going on about someones theory "failing" at this point is a silly position to have, especially when it's done with full conviction and less-than-full understanding of the material.